Alex Reid

I like Michael Geist’s blog, and especially this posting of the alphabetical rundown of the year.

Seagate and Western Digital, the largest hard disk drive (HDD) manufacturers in the world, both announced that they will reduce warranty coverage on some of their hardware in the new year.

The two companies produce the hard drives in most major computer brands, and both companies recently bought out their competition (Western Digital bought Hitachi, and Seagate bought Samsung’s HDD business) making them the two largest HDD companies in the world.

It is believed the recent monsoon floods in Thailand are reason as the floods have crippled industry component factories. Thailand is the world’s 2nd largest producer of hard disk drives accounting for approximately 25% of the world’s production. The floods have impacted the industry greatly with pundits predicting a shortage and a price hike for hard drives in the coming year.

Seagate’s warranties for internal desktop and laptop drives will be reduced from five years to one year. Seagate warranties for hybrid drives will be trimmed from five years to three years. Warranties for Seagate’s external drives and enterprise-oriented drives will remain unchanged.

Western Digital warranties for the Caviar Blue, Caviar Green and Scorpio Blue hard drives will be reduced from three years from two years.

Overall, the maximum life warranty will be three years.

Seagate’s new warranty policies will become effective on Dec. 31, and Western Digital’s changes will begin Jan. 2, 2012. Hard drives bought before those dates will retain their original warranty policies.

The reason I’m writing this post is because this upset means a lot for the future of data use, as there is a growing demand for disk space – cloud or not – and this lack of supply will drive up the cost of HDDs. It may, hopefully, push other technologies such as flash storage.

It’s only been a few days since the release of WordPress 3.3, and naturally the WordPress hardcores are working on version 3.4. Specifically the next upgrade will include the new year’s default theme – twenty twelve – which will start with fresh code.

It’s young in thought but the core features planned include:

• mobile version of a website
• variable height header image
• default to static front page
• editor styles the same as front end.
• no featured image in header

WordPress now has an upgraded Toolbar (previously known as the admin bar) and a new HTML5 media uploader that uses Plupload, an open source upload handler with drag-and-drop functionality. WordPress now supports RAR and 7z archive formats.

The responsive design usability of HTML5 has been implemented to help WordPress work on small-screen devices like the iPad and tablets. As you reduce the screen size, features such as the side menu automatically collapse.

Users will find a reduction in repetitive clicking with our new flyout submenus. As you hover over each main menu item in your dashboard navigation, the submenus will appear, providing single-click access to any dashboard tool.

For browsers without HTML5 support, it uses fallback methods, which includes Flash and HTML4. There are also improvements to the Metadata, Settings and Editor APIs, and a new tutorial for beginners has been added.

Overall performance of WordPress is improved.

However, one of the best changes is how quickly I can write a new post or enact a new action within the WordPress dashboard.

Another good feature is the tutorial pointers which appear the first time you see the changes in the dashboard. It’s useful for novice WordPress users.

I highly recommend upgrading or using WordPress today.